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Digital Ocean is a ‘cloud’ hosting provider focusing on VPSs with SSDs called droplets.

They are generally rather cheap for what you are getting and their entry level droplet with 512MB memory, 1 core, 20GB disk and 1TB transfer only costs $5 per month ($0.007 per hour).

Orain, one of the projects that I am currently helping out with, currently powers all of its services with a handful of these droplets, and through the maintenance of these services I realise more and more that aspects of Orain really are not suited to live on DO.

Many other virtual server providers allow the purchase of different configurations of resources, within a predefined set, for example some VPSs may be memory intensive and others disk intensive.

Digital Ocean does not do this. Instead they provide a single set of scaling resource ratios (seen below).

For many use cases this may not be an issue, currently for Orain it is. Orain stores files uploaded by its users across multiple sites. These files never get deleted and thus the amount of space used by Orain on the server the files are located on is ever increasing despite the general load and memory usage remaining the same.

Also totally the opposite is happening on other Orain servers, for example the mediawiki nginx servers are not really ever going to need more disk space, despite the cpu and memory needs ever increasing.

It’s looking like it is time to move, at least some services, away from Digital Ocean!